Oyster Salad
The oysters should be parboiled. Cut into halves, mix with celery and serve with a mayonnaise tartar dressing.
Four lines of instruction that assume you already know how to handle oysters. The only real technique here is the parboil, and it is where the dish is won or lost.
- Parboil means barelyDrop shucked oysters into their own strained liquor (or lightly salted water) held just below a simmer and lift them out the moment the edges ruffle and the bodies firm — roughly 1 to 2 minutes. Anything approaching a quarter hour turns them tough and shrunken, and they will not recover in the dressing.
- Cool them fastSpread the drained oysters on a plate and chill thoroughly before mixing. Warm oysters will thin the mayonnaise and weep liquor into the salad.
- Buy them shuckedA pint of shucked oysters (about 24 to 30 medium) with a large head of celery makes four servings. Save the liquor for the poaching water; it seasons them better than salt.
- Cut into halvesThis applies to standard or select oysters. Small ones can be left whole; the aim is pieces that match the celery dice for the fork.
- CeleryUse the pale inner ribs, strung and cut into short crosswise pieces. Crisping them in ice water for half an hour is worth the trouble, since the celery is the only crunch in the dish.
- Mayonnaise tartar dressingIn this period the term typically meant mayonnaise loosened slightly and stirred with chopped pickles or capers, onion or shallot, and parsley — sometimes a little chopped hard-boiled egg. Dress lightly and just before serving.
- ServingA common period presentation was a cup of crisp lettuce, or the salad heaped back into deep shells. Serve cold, and keep it refrigerated until it goes to the table.
Rufus Estes published Good Things to Eat in 1911, having been born into slavery in Tennessee and gone on to cook for Pullman private railroad cars and later for the subsidiary of U.S. Steel in Chicago; his book is one of the earliest cookbooks published by an African American chef. Its terseness is professional shorthand hem for people who already knew what a tartar dressing was. Oyster salad belongs to a period when oysters were cheap, abundant and shipped inland by rail in barrels and cans, which is exactly how a Chicago kitchen would have had them; cold oyster salads, oyster cocktails and creamed oysters were staples of American menus of the era.